


my hands to god to save her

by katadesmoi



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, F/M, Fluff and Angst, High Chaos (Dishonored), Low Chaos (Dishonored), dunwall is alive metaphorically but also literally, for corvo but ALSO dunwall, it's both, its about the GRIEF u know, the pre-canon parts are fluff. the canon parts are NOT
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:47:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25330363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katadesmoi/pseuds/katadesmoi
Summary: Emily laughs, and Corvo feels an intense surge of emotion, a cut-men-to-pieces/raze-the-city/throw-yourself-to-the-ocean frenzy of protectiveness (a feeling he has always labelled love).Or: Corvo has always belonged to Dunwall.
Relationships: Corvo Attano & Emily Kaldwin, Corvo Attano & The Heart, Corvo Attano/Jessamine Kaldwin
Comments: 5
Kudos: 41





	my hands to god to save her

**Author's Note:**

> [blacks out and writes 8000 words about corvo attano and his relationship with this city and with the endless cycle of bloodhsed and violence knitted into dunwall's very foundations] i love this game so fucking much  
> title is from Hand to God by Thao & the Get Down Stay Down  
> warnings: descriptions of blood/gore (nothing worse than what's already in the game), mentions of alcohol and cigarettes, implied sexual content, references to whaling and the associated cruelty  
> ALSO i don't like the canon age gap between Corvo and Jess, so i am ignoring it. the whole dynamic where he meets her when she's TWELVE is uh. Bad. i think. So we're not doing that.

THE STARVEN MAN

Corvo Attano staggers off the boat, strung thin and still coiled for a fight, partly too stunned to do anything more than listen and accept as he is shunted firmly into place upon the chessboard. He watches everything with shadowed eyes. The planes of his face are angular as a skull from hunger and fatigue; carved hollow by Coldridge.

The conspirators do not care. What is left will still be of use to them.

As Attano slips inside the pub, Pendleton takes a breath and asks, “Did we really have to make him crawl through a _sewer_? The man smells like death.”

Havelock just laughs.

The man shadowing the doorway is so gaunt you can almost see his skeleton pressing up against the thin cage of his flesh. Cecelia busies herself wiping down the bench as he scans the place, methodical and silent, although she can’t help her curiosity. She glances up, hoping for another glimpse – only to have his gaze snare hers in an instant. There’s something so hollow and empty there that she cannot even bear the full weight of it. She looks down, cheeks heating. “I-is there something you need, Lord Attano?”

Across the room, Wallace makes a sound of disapproval, a sure sign that she’s going to catch hell for _some_ breach of etiquette later. Attano doesn’t seem to care.

“Is there—” he pauses. His voice is low and rough and halting, and there’s a twisting to his _R_ sounds. She remembers, distantly, that he’s Serkonnan. He swallows and seems to drag the words out of his own throat with all the effort in him. “Food. Please.”

 _Oh_. “Of course,” Cecelia says quickly, fumbling with the rag and desperately racking her brain for the morning’s inventory. _Of course_ he’s hungry—stupid of her not to realise. She stares blankly at the shelves, and manages, “There’s tinned fish. I—we could have some fruit, out the back, but nothing like I’m sure you’re used to, sir.”

“S’okay,” Attano says abruptly. He inclines his head and a wry look crosses his face – not really a smile, but something close – “Tinned is fine.”

“Yeah. Uh, okay. Here,” Cecelia says, setting down whatever she can find on the shelves behind the counter, drawing back so quickly Attano might as well be a rattlesnake. If he notices her skittishness, he doesn’t let on. “Do you—uh, want something to drink? Sir?”

“Water,” he just says, pulling reverently at the tab on a tin of brined hagfish. He picks up a fork and begins to eat, in small economical bites, chewing slowly. Cecelia freezes, glass in hand and the tap still running. She’s seen a lot of folk eat like that before – her ma, her sister, one of her old friends down at the boardhouse, hell, _herself_ in the old days. You eat slow and careful like that when it’s been a while since you last ate, to stop it all just coming back up again. Something you learn when you get accustomed to skipping meals.

Cecelia can’t help but wonder—it doesn’t seem like the first time he’s done this. Maybe the former Lord Protector is no stranger to starvation. She doesn’t know what to think about that. The glass is overflowing onto her hands, freezing cold. She tips a little out and turns of the tap and wipes down the outside of the glass with a rag, and she sets it down beside Attano. He makes a noise in thanks, and she doesn’t say a thing.

He begs a notebook off Joplin and folds away the scraps of paper he’d collected. His handwriting is even but a little shaky. Even clenching his fist hurts a little after the interrogation room. Poking and prodding and needling. Aching all over. He takes a deep breath. One letter at a time.

> _19-Month of High Cold-1837_
> 
> _Burns healing; cuts still open (washed + dressed, elixir helps)_
> 
> _Dreamt of home._
> 
> _Safe here. Find Emily._

He frowns, unsatisfied with the empty space left on the rest of the page. After a moment, he begins to draw the edge of a woman’s profile in rough but practised hand. He stops just short of the line of an eyelid, unable to bring himself to make it recognisable. He shuts the notebook carefully and stretches out his now-aching fingers.

HE DREAMS

There is a devil on his back, heavy and squat and stinking of fish and flies and oil-smoke. He staggers, falls, from dream into an un-dream of the Void.

Once, when he’d just been appointed to the Serkonnan Guard, he’d been called out to deal with some trouble on one of the docks. He’d spent his whole life in Karnaca, but most of that had been in Batista, all sharp hills and wind and the acrid dust that stuck in every fold of skin. He still remembers first smelling the docks, that awful sweet marine stench. Whale blood was draining across the concrete, ruby red beneath the blazing blue sky. The ordinary ocean-smell mingled with slaughter. It clung to him and his clothes, to everyone there, like just stepping into the machinery of the Empire’s whaling engine even for a moment would have you soaked head to toe in oil and blood.

(No one there had clean hands.)

That smell lingers in the Void. Distant, punctuated by something earthy like the sky and paving meeting before hot rain, but just as ancient and just as foul.

The devil leads him over black crystal and spine. He kisses Corvo’s hand and it comes away blackened and burning, and when Corvo clenches his fist it erupts into blue light, like a flame. And then the devil leads him to an altar where something red and feeble lies, a voice encased in a human heart strung through with wire and bone. The cruelty is unfathomable: when it speaks, Corvo cannot see through his tears.

Corvo has only been religious in passing, out of convenience and necessity. He’s never had the patience to sit through the Abbey’s sermons. He has already been named murderer – why not heretic too? He’ll take any name they give him, as long as Emily is safe.

He’s already dead anyway.

THE HAUNTING

They lock him away in the attic, like some dark shadow set to haunt the Hound Pits. Cecelia is sent up there in the morning to clean his room and change the sheets and tell him that there’s still some hot water left in the washroom downstairs. The whole space feels too-small and too-big at once, when Attano unlocks the door. He leans upon the doorframe wearily, face drawn into a grimace – she must be imagining things, because it seems like his face softens when he sees it’s her.

“New sheets,” she manages to say, holding up the pile of laundry.

He just shrugs.

“There’s also hot water downstairs. For a—bath,” Cecelia says, realising halfway through her sentence that the remark could be taken as a veiled insult. When she pauses, though, Attano shows no sign of offence. He blinks at her. She adds quickly, “Uh, there are towels in the washroom.”

He nods, and steps aside to let her in. He watches for a moment as she begins stripping the sheets from the bed – in silence, doesn’t remark on the reddish stains where he’d lain – and then he turns and drifts out.

There is a notebook on the end table, still open. The frantic scrawled handwriting on one of the loose leaves of paper catches Cecelia’s eye despite herself. The words scramble over one another for her attention.

_YOU CANNOT SAVE HER YOU CANNOT SAVE HER YOU CANNOT SAVE HER YOU CANNOT SAVE HER YOU CANNOT SAVE HER YOU CANNOT SAVE HER YOU CANNOT SAVE HER YOU CANNOT SAVE HER YOU CANNOT SAVE HER_

She does not know what this means, so she finishes her work and hurries out.

“Has everything been alright?” Callista asks carefully, later. She sips her tea, delicately, and Cecelia nurses a bit of the good whiskey she was able to snipe from Wallace. “What’s the Lord Protector like?”

Cecelia shrugs. She’s not sure how to articulate the mixture of terror and pity he inspires in her. She just says, “He’s quiet, I guess.”

“But he seems—like a good person?” Callista presses. Her fingers glide nervously up and down the handle of her teacup. Cecelia overheard her pleading with Havelock earlier today. Apparently, her uncle’s in trouble.

Cecelia doesn’t know what the right thing to say is. She shrugs, again. “I don’t know. Sometimes he gives me the shivers. But he says please an’ thank you, hardly asks for anything. I was expecting someone who lived in Dunwall Tower to be more—dunno, more like Pendleton.”

Callista nods soberly. They hold a mutual dislike for the man. His presence always leaves something… _sticky_ in the air, like one of those eels you dig up from the river-sludge.

Cecelia adds, thoughtfully, “He’s so quiet he seems like a ghost sometimes. Attano, I mean. Not in the scary way, just—sad.”

HE WAS NOT ALWAYS A GHOST

Corvo Attano, age eighteen, is sharp and quick-maybe-a-little-too-quick. He’s pure Dust District: scraggly and sun-skinned and always with a little dirt under the nails, with those clever dark eyes that never miss a thing (especially when it comes to bright-gleaming silver). He doesn’t smile much, except to bare his teeth in a fight. He gets on with the other kids, but they think he’s a little weird; too serious, spends too much time climbing places he shouldn’t, always watching the gulls cresting on the sea front with a look of intense concentration.

But he is, unmistakeably, alive. He comes home some nights with a bloody nose, and endures Paloma Attano’s fretting and then scolding (and eventually she shows him how to wash blood from his clothes with an air of exasperation, knowing this will be far from the last occasion it will be needed). He misses his sister, and his mother finds drafts of unsent letters to her crumpled beneath his bed, which she reads and then weeps over and then carefully crumples and returns to their place.

It’s at this age that he wins the Blade Verbana. The whole thing is a matter of pride, more than anything else: there’s no way he’s gonna let himself lose a fight to one of those puffed up shining aristocrats’ sons. They didn’t grow up brawling and scattering through Batista’s narrow streets, never ran errands for them Howlers or been beaten by a guard in a bad mood until they bled. It shows, too, when they finally cross blades. Corvo fights whip-like and vicious, with the kind of feral edge you only get with starving dogs. His opponents are busy thinking about their good technique and elegant little flourishes, but Corvo, he’s thinking about _stay alive stay alive stay alive_ , and this means that his hands know what to do before even _he_ does.

His speed wins the final fight. He might well be the wind itself as it howls through the streets around his home, untouchable, unrelenting, maybe a little gleeful as it tears around everything in its path. He barely realises the fight’s over until there’s someone grasping his hand and the crowd is on their feet, surging-shouting-baying, and he squints up into the noonday sun and grins with bloody lips.

Later, he’ll be swept off to Dunwall to meet an Emperor whose face he only knows from the coins he’d chip his teeth on. And he’ll shiver at the bite of Gristol’s morning, with the too-watery sun that provides no relief for the fierce wind. He won’t realise it at the time, but the city becomes his home the moment he steps off the boat: it curls around him possessively, the buildings leaning in to watch him pass, the sky coming down close to brush the top of his head. The sea will wash up against the docks, spraying his calves, and it will murmur, _MINE_.

A CONVERSATION WITH THE THING IN HIS HAND

“Does it hurt?” he asks.

_“Always.”_

AN ECHO

Jessamine – the false one stitched into the Heart – is also Dunwall bleeding out in his hands. She is curled among these crumbling buildings like the Wrenhaven, or the tides creeping forth into the flooded streets. She is bleeding so terribly and he can do nothing as red blooms through the grey waters.

He wakes to find the Heart in his hands. Where he presses the too-soft still-wet tissue, blood weeps and stains his fingers. There are already bloody smears on his hand. He stares mutely at the thing, clutching it too-tight, desperate to see it gone and unable to let it go. It pulses weakly in his grip, and the voice murmurs, _“Such sadness, my love.”_

“You’re not her,” Corvo mutters.

_“I am reaching across this gap. Don’t you hear me?”_

He has no response for this, so he settles back on the pillow and shuts his eyes, feeling that warm wet pulse in his hand. Maybe it whispers something else as he drifts back to sleep. In the true morning, he doesn’t remember.

ENTER JESSAMINE

In Dunwall he is appointed bodyguard to a terror of a girl. He must learn to drop his accent and dress warm enough to handle this wretched grey weather every morning. But he’s never quite able to master the chill, nor drop the accent: his _R_ s roll and snap through his words and the vowels tilt in his mouth. Some respond with scorn, some of the ladies fan their faces and titter among one another like finches, and they all gossip, he knows, because he’s a little more fluent than he lets on. Listening has always been far easier than speaking, for him.

The wiriness of poverty shifts to a lean athleticism – Corvo, even when well-fed for once in his life, is a slim man. But now there is muscle to fill out his frame, and he cuts an attractive figure in his youth. He wears his hair loose, a Serkonnan style, and refuses to adopt the Gristolian austerity, a little out of spite and a little out of homesickness. He writes to his mother and reads the words aloud, if only to hear his mother-tongue. Jessamine catches wind of this and begs him to take over her language lessons, a proposition which is shut down the instant the tutor hears Corvo actually speak, because his Serkonnan is casual and sharp and littered with Karnacan slang and profanity. Improper for an Empress, had been the tutor’s wording, although that just makes Jessamine even more determined to learn.

Oh—and Jessamine. Corvo’s yet to grow out of the temper and patience of a teenager, so dealing with the precocious and temperamental and mischievous and _profoundly irritating_ young princess is, as far as he’s concerned, the worst possible job you could ever ask him to do. She steals food and skips her lessons and talks back to tutors and every time, Euhorn Kaldwin is there glaring at Corvo like it’s somehow _his_ fault. Corvo wants to remind the man that it wasn’t _his_ choice to stay here either, but he still has at least some shred of a self-preservation instinct left.

His posting has him accompanying the Lady throughout much of her day, including the time she spends pouring over endless readings and completing assignments at her tutors’ behest. Corvo has reading of his own – Spymaster’s reports and notes on Dunwall’s political and criminal worlds, all written in the same dull Gristolian that takes him a little longer to puzzle out than normal – but _shit_ , what he wouldn’t give to be sitting out in the sun instead. He settles for the window seat and the pale stream of sunlight he can get, and finds himself immediately distracted by the view of the ocean from Dunwall Tower’s high walls, so grey that only the white foam of the waves chopping across the surface distinguish it from the low brow of clouds.

It’s at this moment that Jessamine, in particularly unladylike fashion, slumps down in her chair and groans aloud. “What does this even mean?” she demands to the air. Then she looks at Corvo, almost accusatory. “Come and read this.”

Corvo makes his best attempt at keeping a neutral expression as he extracts himself from his seat, trying not to think about how he’s setting down _matters of national security_ in favour of _a teenager’s homework_. Jessamine stabs a pale finger at the offending text, as Corvo peers over her shoulder. Ah. It’s her Serkonnan textbook. The passages are annotated in Gristolian, pulling the language apart with technical terms he’s never seen before.

“Do you need to know what this says?” Corvo says slowly.

“I can read it,” Jessamine snaps. Then she amends, “Well, some of it. I just don’t _get it_.”

“Tell me where the trouble is.”

Jessamine points to a word. “I don’t know what this means, and I can’t find it in any of my glossaries.”

“Oh. That means _walking_.”

“No it doesn’t, it already says that here,” Jessamine says, pointing to something else. “It’s a different word, I don’t—oh. It’s a participle. I just haven’t seen this ending before.” Corvo doesn’t know what this means. He waits, while Jessamine scribbles something down in her workbook. She sets down the pen with a huff. “This language is so stupid. How do you _do_ it?”

Corvo considers this. He says, “Practise.”

“Alright, then,” Jessamine says brightly. And then she adds, in passable but stilted Serkonnan, “You can help.”

From then on, they conduct as many of their interactions as they can in Serkonnan. Jessamine has a good grasp of grammar, but she can never roll her _R_ s quite right. Corvo has to speak much slower than he would normally, mostly because Jessamine had never heard anything like the Batista accent before. Shifting languages after spending weeks speaking and reading Gristolian is jarring, but it feels like homecoming, slipping easy beneath cool sheets in the evening.

At one point, Corvo makes a rather acerbic remark about Dunwall’s cuisine. Jessamine blinks, seemingly stunned, and then she laughs, switching back to Gristolian for a moment to say, “I’m sorry, was that _sarcasm_?”

Corvo feels a little stab of indignance at that, before he realises that she probably hasn’t seen him so animated before. His reserved and laconic manner is worsened by his second language. Still, she catches his affronted look and grins.

“I wasn’t sure you had a sense of humour under there,” she says.

“Only in my mother-tongue,” Corvo says wryly in Serkonnan. Jessamine laughs again. It is a nice sound.

A few days into the exercise and she’s quickly improving, although one afternoon she comes out with a word that makes Corvo splutter, almost spilling his tea onto the carpet. “Where the hell did you learn to say _that_?” he demands in Serkonnan.

“From _you_ ,” Jessamine says pointedly. Corvo realises belatedly that he’d just let slip another Karnacan profanity. “I can hear you saying it under your breath every time I do something.”

“Something _stupid_ , you mean,” Corvo says reproachfully. He fights a smile, trying to remain sober. “You really shouldn’t let your father hear you saying those words.”

“Why not?”

“He hates me enough as it is,” Corvo says.

“He doesn’t hate you,” Jessamine protests.

“ _You_ didn’t see the look he gave me when he found out you spent your last harp lesson climbing that tree,” Corvo says wryly.

Jessamine pauses, and relents. “Alright,” she admits. “Maybe he _disapproves_ of you.”

Corvo nods, victorious.

“But,” Jessamine says, raising a finger. “It doesn’t matter what he thinks anyway. _I_ chose you, remember?”

And for the first time since arriving in this wretched city, Corvo cannot say that he feels homesick.

In his time off, away from Jessamine’s side, Corvo joins the other guards in sparring or at the pub, and there’s a few kids his age who he gets on alright with, even if a few sneer at his accent. He can beat them all in a fight (fist or sword) and outdrink half of them anyway, and that earns their respect (and in that regard, Dunwall isn’t so different to Karnaca after all). He meets a few young ladies and a few young men too, exchanging kisses in dark corners like brawls in an alley, but it’s rare to meet the same person twice and they all have lives and duties waiting for them in the sunrise.

The first time he kills for Jessamine, she is still fifteen. An assassin makes it all the way into the royal apartments in the dead of the night. Corvo stabs him in the neck. There is blood pooling on the hard-wood floor, sprayed on his face and shirt. He shattered a cabinet when the man pushed him backwards, and the sound woke up the Lady Jessamine. She opens the door, a split-second before the guards make it. Her eyes fall on the corpse, and then on Corvo, his hands still fresh with blood from murdering a man. She screams, and he registers that reaction, distantly, as entirely normal for a girl her age.

“Take the body away,” he tells the guards. He will be angry, tomorrow, because they let the assassin get so close. But right now a girl is screaming and he can’t think of anything else to do but set down the sword and wipe his hands on his shirt. He approaches Jessamine and the scream dies in her throat, and she stares up at him, small and scared, dark hair curtaining around her face. He reaches for the door, to close it—and she darts forward, slamming into him, face pressed to his chest, holding onto him like he’s the only thing keeping her upright.

The blood on his shirt is staining her nightgown. He tries to extract himself from the embrace, but she just clings tighter. Shaking. His hands are bloody and he does not understand why she is hugging him.

Finally, after far too long, she withdraws. She wipes her nose. Her front is stained red. She says, “You need a new shirt.”

He nods. He says, “Stay in your room.”

She looks past him, to the blood and the shattered cabinet. Anxious and trembling. He sighs, and relents.

“Come on.”

She trails after him, to his own room, and sits quietly on the bed while he disappears into the washroom. He soaks the blood away, swipes a washcloth across his face, changes into a clean shirt and pants. When he comes back in, she’s holding one of his knives in her lap like a talisman. Her grip’s all wrong, too tight. She looks as scared of the blade as she is of what might come through the door.

He eases it from her hands, but he doesn’t put it back in its place.

Her voice is small, when she next speaks. “Can I sleep here tonight?”

“I’ll be here,” Corvo manages to say, feeling, suddenly, a very earnest need to protect her. From everything and anything the world might bring forth. He wishes desperately she hadn’t had to see the body or the blood. He’ll be quicker, next time, he promises himself. He’ll be quieter. He sits at the foot of the bed facing the door, as she draws the sheets over her head. The knife is in his lap, at the ready. There will be nothing else to disturb her sleep tonight. This is his duty.

> _20-Month of High Cold-1837_
> 
> _Offerings: 4 runes_
> 
> _See through the walls. Rats come when called._
> 
> _Dreamt back in Coldridge. Emily was waiting. Too many bodies; couldn’t climb over them all. Drowned._

EMILY KALDWIN, ALIVE, BREATHING

In his arms he holds the entire world, curled up against his side as the boat sways and dips over the river. Emily touches the mask in his hand, curiously running her fingers over the rough-soldered edges of the metal. He gently brushes her touch away from it, not able to bare the thought of her little fingers catching on a sharp edge and leaving her with a stinging cut. She giggles, and Corvo feels a sudden surge of intense emotion at the sound, a cut-men-to-pieces/raze-the-city/throw-yourself-to-the-ocean frenzy of protectiveness (a feeling he has always labelled _love_ ).

THE WITNESS

Corvo Attano makes for a quiet houseguest. He has something resembling a routine: wake early, stretch and exercise in the yard while the sun rises pale over the river, eat breakfast with little Emily in the corner booth inside the pub, before getting on with whatever is required of him that day. Often, if not otherwise engaged, he’ll go wandering, or disappear into his room to tinker with whalebone. Sometimes he’ll drift into a room and inspect the things there with idle curiosity, or offer help with shifting furniture or maintenance or whatever other odd jobs need doing.

He speaks little. Sometimes he might have a question – often he’ll approach Callista and inquire, quietly, if Emily is doing okay – but he seems content to listen. Always listen. It still leaves Cecelia’s neck pin-pricking with unsettlement, just a little. He moves around like he’s carrying some awful weight at his neck. But he’s never unkind, not to them – perhaps to Piero, when he’s caught spying through keyholes, or to Pendleton, who treats them all like dirt anyway, but otherwise—

Cecelia comes to change the linens and finds Attano still in bed, little Emily curled against his side on top of the sheets, still with her shoes on. He blinks at Cecelia, and motions for her to be quiet with a finger to his lips. There is gentle affection in the way he touches Emily’s shoulder and rouses her softly. She yawns and mumbles something blearily before she fully wakes, and then she sees Cecelia and says brightly, “Oh, good morning.”

“Morning,” Cecelia says awkwardly. She wonders if the girl is really Attano’s daughter. They both act like it. Emily begins chattering about her plans for the day, about breakfast, about whether Corvo will be going somewhere again. Attano extracts himself from the bed and swipes a hand through his too-long hair and smiles, the most warmth Cecelia’s ever seen from him.

He immediately begins pulling the linens from the bed. Cecelia protests – that’s what she’s here for – but it dies in her throat when she sees the way Attano carefully folds the fabric, to hide the blood stains from Emily. Cecelia can see the shadow of scars through his undershirt, but there’s thin smears of blood all across his left hand too. She waits quietly until he’s finished. When he hands the folded pile to her, his look says, _not a word_. She just nods.

He’s still a little scary, but—safe. Not the same kind of frightening as Havelock or Martin (whose eyes carry an almost feverish intelligence, snake-like and hungry). Half the time it seems like Attano’s in need of protection of his own, so lost and quiet and weary.

Little Emily comes to steal food from the kitchen in the afternoon, and Cecelia shows her how to make dump cake, a cheap recipe using vinegar instead of eggs (although the cleverness of this is rather lost on Emily).

“Oh, and if no one’s looking, you can lick the bowl,” Cecelia says conspiratorially.

“But it’s not cooked,” Emily says, non-plussed.

“Just try it,” Cecelia says, suddenly feeling oddly pitying of the fact that this girl likely hasn’t prepared a single meal for herself in her life.

They’re interrupted by Wallace clattering about, and Cecelia grabs Emily’s hand and pulls her behind one of the shelves, where they crouch holding back giggles while the old butler swears about the mess and grouses to himself. Afterwards, when they retrieve the cake batter and put it in the oven, Emily remarks cheerily that she’s always wanted a sister. It makes Cecelia’s heart ache like all hell—she’s never felt much sympathy for rich folks, but she can’t believe people are tearing this whole _kid’s_ life apart over this foul city.

She washes the blood from the sheets and from Attano’s shirts. When she’s hanging them out to dry, she catches Attano crouched on the docks, staring into the water and clutching at something red and bloody in his hand. She can see bone and wire and a faint-pulsing light. She glances at Samuel, tinkering with the boat nearby, but he doesn’t seem to notice the ghoulish sight. After a moment, Attano sighs, and folds the thing into the air like it was never there at all. She doesn’t know what possibility is worse: if that thing was someone else’s heart, or his own.

(Cecelia is so adept at slipping from sight that she may as well be a ghost herself. She often sees things that should remain unseen. Don’t trouble yourself about it—it already troubles her enough.)

YOU ARE BOUND TO THE PATH WRITTEN FOR YOU.

IN ONE WORLD:

He doesn’t even know _why_ he kills, sometimes. His hands move of their own accord – or perhaps he’d rather believe that they did. The truth frightens him.

It is as if, once the blood began flowing, it could not stop. At first it was survival: he had a stolen sword and six-months’ worth of bloody wounds on his back and what paltry food he has been given was crawling with bluebottles. He was in no state to take the hard way out – and believe me, whatever people say, it is easier to kill than not. So his blade slips through jugular and spleen and rib, and he keeps close to the shadows where he can. The blood slicks off as he dives into the water, to freedom.

The next time, it is grief that moves his hand, his grief for Jessamine and Emily and maybe himself turned outwards and vicious and indiscriminate. He brands Campbell, and it cannot be called mercy, for there is far too much satisfaction in watching metal sear flesh. There is something cold and terrible and alien in Corvo’s heart, and it is hungry.

He feeds it, thinking it will be sated. That somehow by turning his grief outwards he might exorcise it, shed it like a snake-skin, leave it to rot with the rest of the corpses. But it only hinges its jaw wider, and wider, and by the time he realises it will consume _him_ , too, it is too late. He just—keeps going. A shambling shell held together by nothing but fury and violence and the blood.

IN ANOTHER:

There is no world where Corvo is not weighed down by grief. It fills him up, this hollow ghost of a man. Sometimes he wonders if he would be free of it, if he let it loose, but then he remembers Jessamine and he remembers her eyes on that first bloody corpse at his feet and he thinks, I cannot spill more blood in her name.

If Jessamine were alive, it is hard to decide how far she would go to get her daughter back. Maybe she would’ve crawled out of the ocean with a Mark of her own, and dragged as many men as it took into the Void until Emily was safe. She would not have enjoyed it, but perhaps she would have seen the way her people were corralled and starved and left to rot in the mouldering streets, and she would have felt righteous in her chosen path. I think everyone can be made a little cruel by enough horror. Do you recall how the Heart seethes at the sight of its killer, later?

(Besides, there are no good Empresses; only those who are able to maintain order, and those who are not. What does it say about lovely Jessamine, that she had been so well-suited for her role?)

Years ago, when she was still young, Jessamine had once asked, “How many people have you killed?”

Corvo had paused in his reading – Spymaster’s reports, always – and makes the mental calculation. Soldiers lose track easily: it is hard to keep a number, when you’re trying to keep alive. He’d settled for the smallest figure, the only one he was really certain of. “Three, for you.”

She’d taken a breath, and then let it out slowly. Perhaps she’d been realising the number would only climb, once she came of age and took the throne.

It did.

Jessamine never screamed after the first time. Corvo often managed to subdue them without killing them, but—there was always someone’s blood to be cleaned afterwards. Jessamine always watched on stoically, maybe trembling, maybe a little paler than usual. Once or twice it was Corvo’s blood, and she’d demanded the physician, her voice tight with panic, and she’d sat him down and fumbled with his shirt sleeves and a washcloth even as he’d tried to order her away.

“I need you to show me how to use this properly,” she’d said one day, terribly serious, holding the knife he keeps beside his pillow in both hands. She’d looked up at him, and added, “However much it troubles you, Corvo, there may be a day when you are not fast enough.”

Oh, it troubled him. There was never a moment when he made a conscious realisation of it, but at some point, Lady Jessamine’s safety had become more than a simple matter of employment or duty. His world had narrowed, gradually, to her and her alone. He was certain, in the distant way of accepted fact, like knowing the moon would rise and the river would flow, that one day he would die for her.

(The memory chokes him, now.)

He’d taken the knife from her, and positioned it in her hands. Shown her the right grip. He’d said, “Don’t hold it so tightly.”

She’d done as he’d said. He demonstrated the motion – slashing not stabbing – and she mirrored him, knife in hand. She’d always been a quick study.

“Strike where you can reach,” he’d said, and he pointed to the places she should aim: throat, gut, groin.

“What about the heart?” she’d asked, reaching out and putting a hand on his chest. Her skin was cold, through the fabric of his shirt.

He’d smiled grimly, and gently pulled her hand away. “You are aiming to escape, my Lady. Not kill. Soft targets are easier to hit.”

Jessamine had nodded solemnly: in these matters of violence, she had trusted him implicitly.

Corvo wishes he could extract the grief from himself and let it drop to the bed of the Wrenhaven. It is so heavy, it would sink easily. But the grief is part of you, and you must bear it. Eventually there’ll come a day when you don’t notice it, anymore, and perhaps then, it will drop from your shoulders like a bird finally finding its wings, and it shall flutter upon the wind. Perhaps you will look up and see it, cresting upon the clouds, and you shall remember how it felt, and perhaps you shall feel a little guilty for letting it go. Sometimes, when you are older, it will return to alight upon you, for a day, a week, an hour, but by then it shall be familiar and you shall bear it with grace. That is grief: never truly gone, but I swear, it will lighten with time.

Corvo knows this. It hurts no less.

> _22-Month of High Cold-1837_
> 
> _Dreamt of the rats. The stench in Sokolov’s cell._
> 
> _More runes. Howling wind. Time stops at a call.4 new bone charms. rattling they sing the whale-song_

Author’s note: the rest of the notebook page is taken up by a rough pen-sketch of the city, as viewed from the highest point on Kaldwin Bridge.

REPRIEVES

Corvo was never any good at parties. They were only ever made bearable by Jessamine, in the moments when she wasn’t occupied with the politics and diplomacy that such events were a disguise for. But everything else – his rough Serkonnan manner and his accent and his dislike for small talk – made him ill-suited for navigating the particular social minefield that was the Imperial court.

The only reprieve was the dancing – _that_ , at least, he enjoyed. Karnaca’s streets were always filled with some kind of music, and he still remembers late nights under the stars with Beatrici or his mother or whoever else he was spending the evening with, laughing as they spun and clapped and stomped in time with the guitar and flute and fiddle. Gristol’s dances are different, of course, the music and movement restrained and austere and a little boring, but—movement is movement, one way or another. Corvo relishes it.

Jess had taught him the courtly waltz, just before her formal debut when she turned eighteen. He’d been expected to keep an eye on her during the party, of course, so he’d have little time for dancing. But just in case, Jess had insisted, and Corvo hadn’t objected. She’d wound up the audiograph and demonstrated the steps, fumbling a little while she tried to remember how to lead. Then she’d grabbed his hands and positioned them carefully at her waist, grinning up at him as she counted aloud to the music. He had a good head for memorising the patterns, and fencing had always required some measure of footwork. Partnerwork came easily – a simple matter of counting steps, of shifting weight against weight, and of letting momentum do its work – but perhaps that was because it was with Jessamine.

It was time well-spent, if only because it was in her company. And if, later, she had taken him by the chin and gently guided his lips to hers—well, that’s between the two of them.

There is no dancing at the party of the Ladies Boyle, just alcohol and gossip and extravagance. Corvo takes a glass of champagne and realises immediately that he cannot remove the mask to drink it. Having something to do with his hands makes him feel better anyway. The table is piled high with suckling pig and fresh fruit and honeyed hors d’oeuvres, barely touched, more food than he’s seen in half a year. He grits his teeth at the sheer waste of it all. How many walls had he passed on his way here, scrawled with _SEND US FOOD NOT BULLETS_? The part of him that is still that starven child of the Dust District rages silently while he clutches the useless champagne flute, and goes in search of the Lord Regent’s lover.

THE WORLD BETWEEN WORLDS

In a dream he will not remember, Corvo faces himself. It is a face he doesn’t quite recognise. He says, “Who are you?”

The spectre says, “A ghost.”

Corvo rubs thumb and forefinger together, still slick with warm blood. The spectre’s hands are clean but his eyes are still dead. Mercy, too, provides no release: their grief is endless and unyielding.

“Is it better?” the red-handed Corvo asks.

The spectre watches for a moment, and then shakes its head. “The rot is still there. Just harder to see, now.”

A pause.

“Is there a world where we get it right?”

Silence. They don’t know the answer.

THE WORLD WHERE THEY GET IT RIGHT:

Dunwall sinks into the ocean. The blood at its foundations seeps, black and brown, into the grey water, blooming outwards like flowers. Clean, finally, in its death.

HE WAKES

> _5-Month of Ice-1837_
> 
> _Tired. Dreamt I drowned again._
> 
> _New runes: go from flesh to fur to scale—moved a man’s limbs like they were my own how does it feel? It is wrong but_ [unintelligible]

Author’s note: a drawing takes up the rest of the page. Rats, the Heart, and whale-bone runes have been scrawled in black ink, along with a sketch of the Dunwall skyline, poorly spaced and shunted up against the rest of the drawings, until it seems the city itself is constructed from bone and flesh.

ONE LAST CONVERSATION

In the hours before Attano leaves to handle the Lord Regent, everything is quiet. Cecelia finds Callista on the landing overlooking the yard, pensively considering an unlit cigarette in her hand. Below, the sound of Emily Kaldwin’s laughter rings out across the river. She is sitting with Attano on the edge of the docks, leaning over to watch something in the water. Attano has that same sad smile he always has on around her.

Callista shifts in acknowledgement as Cecelia comes to lean on the railing. They both watch quietly for a moment. Cecelia says, “Strange to think it’s all almost over.”

Callista smiles wanly. “It is, isn’t it?”

“What are you gonna do? Afterwards?” Cecelia asks.

Callista shrugs, and glances out towards Emily. Attano is showing her how to skip stones, now. Emily’s giggles are punctuated by the splash of rocks in the water. Callista says, “I don’t know.”

“Me neither,” Cecelia says, with a little laugh. “Say, the Empress might let you stay on as her governess, right?”

Callista shrugs again. “It’s hard to say. Havelock is so particular about these things.”

“Who cares what they say? Emily’s the Empress, and she likes you well enough,” Cecelia says. But Callista shoots her a look, and her heart sinks. “One of ‘em’s gonna be Lord Regent, aren’t they?”

“Emily’s still young,” Callista says grimly. “I don’t know what they’re planning, but—” she cuts herself off, flashes Cecelia a tight-lipped smile. “I’m sure everything will be okay. Emily’s got Corvo looking after her now.”

EXIT JESSAMINE

He dreams so often of the day she dies that the very memories have become distorted. How many men had it been? What had she said to him? They sink, among Emily and the spectres in whaler-masks and his own traitorous, useless hands.

He dreams of it again. Dragged in and out of the vision by the poison, as the boat drifts upon the floodwaters. Her eyes are bright and her lips are too red, and she pleads with him, for something. He doesn’t know what, but he knows he can’t give it.

Emily had promised him a drawing. She’d been working so hard on it, refused to let him see (and he’d laughed, part-exasperated, when she shut him out of the tower to give her enough time to gather up the loose papers, so he wouldn’t even see a hint of it before it was ready). He feels some incoherent spike of rage upon the realisation that she won’t be able to give it to him.

The Heart is heavy in his hands. It barely bleeds anymore, the flesh turned leathery, but it still carries a terrible warmth. If he shuts his eyes and holds it to his cheek, he might believe he was resting his face upon her shoulder again. A sigh, a murmur. Perhaps she shall roll over and press her lips to his forehead—just once more. Just once more.

ON MERCY

He finds Campbell at the bottom of the factory, scarred and gibbering, dragging water-logged feet upon the ground as he paces out his remaining days before the plague claims the rest of him. The rats scatter at Corvo’s feet as he alights carefully, one hand stilling the chains that threaten to rattle and wake every poor soul dying in this place. Corvo watches, a moment, before stooping to reclaim his gear. Watches the wretched man who, it seems, was doomed to die the instant he was marked by the conspiracy.

Perhaps Corvo’s blade would have been truer mercy, in the end.

THE MIRROR

Corvo’s mirror wears a red coat, and a scar on his face, and he watches the world like it took something from him and he never expects to get it back.

Corvo lunges. Daud laughs wildly (breathless, maybe relieved) as he meets him, blade-to-blade. Both are _survivors_ : they carry the wind (howling through the hollow streets of their homeland) in their bones, that vicious kill-before-you’re-killed speed seizing their limbs. They weave through the air, the thick rain-smell of the Void rising, and time stutters and starts again, and again, and again. Corvo sees red: the coat, the blood, his rage choking him (even in the world where he is clean-handed and silent).

Parry, dodge, parry again, a lucky strike—his mirror off balance and staggering. Step forward and drive forth the blade without even thinking—a gasp, and he vanishes.

Corvo gulps down bitter elixir and wipes his mouth, before following. Even the red of that coat can’t hide the blood. Corvo listens, numbly, as the assassin makes his speech. The words are shot through with the ragged breathing of a man struggling to stay upright.

Mercy or pity do not stay his hand; but perhaps spite and fatigue do. The Heart pulses wearily in his hand. Pick one:

  1. Corvo looks down at the murderer and refuses to repeat those crimes;
  2. Corvo looks down at the murderer and realises he is no better (although perhaps, at least, _Corvo’s_ hands aren’t stained by Jessamine’s blood);



Whatever it is, Corvo leaves his mirror upon Rudshore’s mouldering skeleton. Bleeding, but still breathing.

A CONVERSATION WITH THE TRUTH

How heavy is your conscience, weighted in your palm? Does the wire cut your fingers?

_“Why am I still here, my love? I am so tired, and there is so much suffering.”_

Corvo has had the same thought many times, these past few days.

THE CITY BEGINS WITH A SACRIFICE

Blood seeps upwards through earth. This is the universal rule of all things: a city founded upon blood shall be doomed to it. The earth remembers. It knows who walks upon it.

THE MIRROR BELOW YOUR FEET

You can’t be free of this city.

(The city can’t be free of you.)

You were not born here, and yet—no. No, you were born from darkness and water and blood upon the stones. You died where she did, and like her heart strung-through-with-wire that you cradle in your hands, you have been resurrected. Wrenched from grave peace by an unfeeling world. You _were_ born here, from this city’s blood, from this city’s tears.

Why are you here? To deliver justice? Vengeance? To lay her to rest? To lay yourself to rest?

The city is eating you. Gently, tenderly – it does this because it loves you – but you can feel its teeth hooked in your calf. It is so hungry. Bloated with starvation. The bodies pile at the edge of the rotting grey tides of the flooded streets. You can see the city’s ribs. Iron and cedarwood bared to the elements. Beached carcass, split open by the birds or the cleaver like the whale-corpses in the slaughterhouse. Stinking guts rotting in the sun.

(Or maybe it’s older than that: bone bleached white, only the faintest pink strings of meat still hanging at the place where two joints meet, and even the crows will pick that free at last. The bones will be left hollow as they came, and even those too will return to the earth.)

You have fed yourself to it. Fed others to it, too, in one world. Limb by limb, bloody mouthful by bloody mouthful. Still, it starves. You are all it has, now. It clings to your back. Perhaps, if you claw your way from this grief, you can drag it up with you, towards the pale light. Or maybe you will both rot down here.

You’ve seen the Weepers gorging themselves on whale oil. Perhaps it is the Void they crave, that faintest leeching of divinity. Who’s to say the plague didn’t come from a divine hand? How do you know it was really the rats—did they not spring from the city itself, writhing up from the sewers, those ancient places worming beneath the city’s flesh? Maybe it is trying to purge itself of the violence.

Maybe it is trying to embrace us all.

IN THE END

There are three long, anxious hours between Havelock’s death and Geoff Curnow’s arrival at the lighthouse to set things right. The guards have to be brought back under control, Emily’s safety has to be verified, and the crimes of the conspirators must be laid bare. So Corvo remains in the lighthouse with his daughter (and, depending on the world, three corpses).

In one world, it is dark, but the storm is clearing. Emily, leaning up against the glass windows and squinting at the lights of Kaldwin’s Bridge, watches her father in the reflection. His eyes are shadowed, his neck bent, as he strips off his bloodied jacket and scrubs at his hands in the basin. Below, the sea howls, hungering for them both. She decides, quietly to herself (her shirt stained red where she’d clung to Corvo, when he pulled her back from the edge), that she will not let it take her.

In the other world, it is daylight, and Emily is still shivering. She asks if she can go stand out on the landing, and so Corvo shadows her with quiet nervousness as she leans up against the railing and stares in wonder out at the haze of clouds and her city below. From here, even Dunwall’s clean-picked carcass is beautiful. Emily decides she will set the land to rights.

The Heart pulses against Corvo’s chest. It is murmuring something. Below them, the sea stirs in agreement, and the whisper crests upon the waves: _MINE_. And it settles in to wait, for one day, it shall claim its due.

For now, Corvo Attano grips his daughter’s hand, and tries not to look down.

**Author's Note:**

> oh god THANK YOU????? for reading all this??????  
> comments and kudos mean the whole world to me so please let me know if u enjoyed this :)
> 
> come find me @[katadesmoi](https://katadesmoi.tumblr.com/) on tumblr - i talk about dishonored and greek myths and haunted stuff, and i also post my art there too sometimes  
> (also [this post of mine](https://katadesmoi.tumblr.com/post/621895168449200128/hey-i-love-the-post-about-the-city-being-a) explains a lot fo the stuff in this fic if ur interested in some meta about dunwall ajsdhfgskdf)


End file.
